The drives were put into r/w by emplode. Win98 then crashed, leaving the drives in r/w. When win98 gets rebooted, emplode cannot connect to the empeg because the empeg already has a sync session in progress. empeg gets powered-down with the discs still mounted r/w, and the corruption occurs in the main superblock, necessitating the use of an alternative superblock to complete e2fsck.

That would be my guess too.

Interestingly, there is a failsafe in the player that can sometimes stop this happening. If the PC or Emplode crashes, but the player does not, the player eventually (2 minutes later) decides that Emplode isn't coming back, and remounts the discs read-only by itself.

So the message is (and I admit here it's our fault for not getting the message out more), if your PC has crashed while the Empeg has the "synchronising" screen up, wait for the sychronising screen to go away before powering off the Empeg. Any playlists you were editing will probably still be lost, but at least your filesystem will not get borked.

Peter